Trusting your heart: long-term memory for bad and good people is influenced by resting vagal tone

Several studies have highlighted the role of heart rate variability (HRV) in social engagement and social cognition. However, whether HRV is involved in the ability to remember faces associated with affectively salient behavioural information remains unexplored. The present study aims to close this gap by investigating long-term face-memory accuracy in individuals differing in resting vagally-mediated HRV. Individuals with high or low resting HRV viewed faces associated with episodic information differing in affective valence (positive, neutral, negative) or without any behavioural description. After one week, a face recognition test was administered. High HRV individuals were better at recognizing faces paired with positive and negative behavioural descriptions compared to neutral faces or faces without descriptions. Conversely, low HRV participants did not show any face memory advantage from personal information. The present results suggest that HRV may provide a novel biological marker of long-term face recognition.